As you can see, everything on the site has reverted back to where it was a week ago. No, you did not just step back in time; just I did. Here’s what happened …
Last night I got home and found a note on the WDTB Facebook page from a reader asking if something was wrong with the site because she was unable to get to the Calendar. So, I called up my site to see what’s going on and it says, “There are no posts matching that criteria.” There were no tabs, no posts, just the sidebar. So I looked into my site files to see why it’s not loading, and I find … nothing.
Literally, nothing. There were no posts, no pages, no drafts, no images. My dashboard was empty. Almost three years of work was simply gone. The more than 2,700 posts were reduced to 0.
[Deep breath]
Looking at it made me feel … tired. Really, really tired. I read through a lot of pages of people talking about having their website hacked, and I read through a lot of pages of people talking a lot of technical talk about what to do when your website is hacked. Now, I’m a graphic designer. I don’t know a lot about the technical workings of a website, and reading all that just gave me a migraine.
My takeaway was this: I have a decision to make. I can try to rebuild the site. Or I can take this as a message that it’s time for me to move onto something else in my life. My decision was option three … make no decision, just go bed and face this all later.
I woke up after midnight and got up to check the site to see if this had all been a bad dream. No. The site was still gone. So I started a live chat with my web hosting provider to try to assess just how bad off I actually was. As it turns out, we were able to restore the site up to one week ago. That means I need to redo a lot of the work I did last week to keep you all up-to-date on Memorial Day Weekend happenings and FREE Summer Fun. All the posts regarding events for this weekend (May 18-19) I just need to let go.
So, beginning Monday morning, that’s what I’ll be doing … beginning to rebuild some of what was lost. I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am still crossing my fingers each time I call up my site, hoping beyond hope that it is still there. But more importantly, I am still taking my daughter to Disney On Ice tonight.
Until I can get Memorial Day events back up, please refer to the Calendar, which was unaffected by all this. And I’ll get the FREE summer bowling, reading and movies up again as soon as possible.
Please be patient and bear with me as I rebuild.
~Nikki
Free images from FreeDigitalPhotos.net
